NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

OPEN SHELTERS in parks do not lend themselves to furniture and furnishings in the sense the terms apply in instances of more enclosed buildings. Mobile equipment of these, whether for picnic or trailside use, is almost exclusively picnic table and bench combinations and trailside seats, a little lighter and more finished perhaps than similar items in the open, but almost as limited in form and variety. The furnishings and decorations of lodges, community buildings, refectories, and cabins, on the contrary, can have great variety and contribute importantly to widen the use and improve the appearance of these buildings. They offer a broad field for the exercise of individuality, taste, and ingenuity.

The well-known principles of all good furniture design suitability to purpose, appeal to the eye, and adaptation of technique to materials at hand—apply no less to furniture for park buildings than to other types. In the designing of park furniture, however, further considerations, scarcely less important, should be taken into account.

Simplicity must be the keynote if the furnishings are to appear appropriate in structures which themselves must be unpretentious to be successful in natural settings. If the desired simplicity cannot be guaranteed as a matter of course by the good taste of designers, perhaps the usual scarcity of funds for once deserves a cheer for the curb on elaboration it will force.

A certain simplicity of furnishings is reasonably assured when another guiding factor in appropriate design is acknowledged. This is the long tradition of the locality. Primitive and pioneer furnishings were extremely simple; so were the interpretations of transplanted historic styles developed here by the earliest settlers. The same combinations of controlling historical, racial, climatic, and regional influences that produce park structures of varied types should produce furnishings of equivalent variety. Needless to say, the same set of influences that produced a particular building should have play in determining the furnishing of it.

It would be unfitting to transplant Spanish and Pueblo furniture, suited to park buildings of the Southwest evidencing similar influences in their exterior treatment, to other regions, say the Hudson Valley with its early background of Dutch settlement, New England, or the environs of Chicago. The fine, simple furniture styles of the religious sects the Moravians, Shakers, Amish, Dunkers, and others are a sound inspiration for the furniture of park buildings in localities in Pennsylvania, Western Massachusetts, Iowa, and Ohio where these groups settled, yet only if the buildings to be furnished testify to the same inspirational sources. Primitive furniture of native handcraft and early origin, still being produced by mountain people in remote parts of the Ozarks, the Great Smokies, and other sections of the Appalachians, offers a pattern for park furniture suitable over a considerable, yet by no means a Nation-wide, area. There is hardly a section of the country but has some historic, racial, or other background for a theme in furnishings and decoration that would be truly individual and appropriate.

The available natural resources of any locality influenced the furniture making, weaving, and other crafts of the pioneers and of the primitive races that preceded them. If the practices of these are to inspire the objects contrived in the present for furnishing park buildings, we too must employ native materials and recognize their peculiar advantages and limitations.

Keeping this in mind, we make use of maple, walnut, and other close-grained hardwoods where tradition calls for turned furniture styles, and avoid sharp edges and turnings when soft woods only are available; we realize the suitability of hickory, ash, maple, and pine to particular uses in Windsor and slat back chair construction, and of the soft pines to the furniture styles that employ incised ornament.

Furniture of rustic type having members in the round with beavered tenons can be made from cedar and hickory. After the outer bark of the former wood is removed, the surface is shaved so that the thin, inner red bark sometimes is not entirely removed, and a striking, mottled surface results. Because its bark stays on better than that of most other woods, hickory made into furniture with the bark intact is quite satisfactory and probably represents the peak in allowable rusticity in furniture.

Happily, furniture items contrived from oddly formed wood growth are no longer popular as they once were. It is hoped that there will be no reaction from the current trend that might result in littering our park buildings with contorted multi-forked logs posing as hat trees, sections of tree trunks hollowed out for barrel chairs, and similar monstrosities.

The seats available for chairs of truly primitive type are in a considerable range wood slabs, woven rush, woven splint of hickory or elm, many kinds of leather laced on with leather thongs, and even woven fabrics that reproduce early workmanship and patterns.

The need for hangings and upholstering can often be appropriately supplied by reproductions of early fabrics. The weaving of these has lately been revived in different parts of the country, especially among mountain peoples and the Indians. Indian rugs, hooked rugs, and woven rag carpets will quite generally serve for floor coverings, subject, of course, to geographical location and compatibility with the architecture of the structure to be furnished.

Studied effort must be made to introduce color into the furnishings of park buildings if a certain somberness characteristic of interiors built entirely of natural materials is to be offset. Most untreated woods weather to dull grays and browns, and there is only very limited color in most stone masonry. The accent of bright harmonious colors in fabrics and floor coverings is welcome. It is conceivable under certain conditions that the raw wood of certain types of furniture might be stained or painted in relatively brilliant colors to introduce more gaiety into the interiors than it is permissible to express in the exteriors of park structures.

The feeling of the past is accentuated when items of skilled handcrafts associated with the early days are introduced. Products of the loom have already been mentioned. The art of the blacksmith can supply many details important in the creation of "atmosphere." There are types of hand-wrought iron hardware peculiar to the early New England communities, the German counties of Pennsylvania, and the Spanish settlements of the Southwest. In fireplace fittings there are regional characteristics that can be revived in the re-creations of today. There are items of early lighting equipment of wrought iron, other metals, and turned wood unmistakably identified with particular parts of the country and different periods of development. These invite adaptation to present needs.

There is no longer any special novelty about lighting fixtures fashioned from wagon wheels, ox yokes, and parts of spinning wheels and reels. The spirit of pioneer days will only attach to such adaptations as long as they do not become utterly commonplace by reason of being too often used, a fate that is always treading on the heels of innovations popular because of their quaintness.

• Plate III G—1 — Plate III G—8